The earliest memory I have of ‘programming’ is in the early/mid 90s when my father brought home a computer from work. We could play games on it … so of course I took the spreadsheet program he used (LOTUS 123, did I date myself with that?) and tried to modify it to print out a helpful message for him. It … halfway worked? At least I could undo it so he could get back to work…

After that, I picked up programming for real in QBASIC (I still have a few of those programs lying around), got my own (junky) Linux desktop from my cousin, tried to learn VBasic (without a Windows machine), and eventually made it to high school… In college, I studied computer science and mathematics, mostly programming in Java/.NET, although with a bit of everything in the mix. A few of my oldest programming posts on this blog are from that time.

After that, on to grad school! Originally, I was going to study computational linguistics, but that fell through. Then programming languages (the school’s specialty). And finally I ended up studying censorship and computer security… before taking a hard turn into the private sector to follow my PhD advisor.

Since then, I’ve worked in the computer security space at a couple of different companies. Some don’t exist any more, some you’ve probably heard of. I still program for fun too, and not just in security.

But really, I still have a habit of doing a little bit of everything. Whatever seems interesting at the time!

docker-bash and docker-stop-all

2015-02-04

I’ve been using Docker a fair bit at work, so I’ve added a few quick aliases to my dotfiles make that a little bit easier:

docker-bash - attach a bash shell to the first available docker instance
docker-stop-all - stop all running docker instances

iOS Backups in Racket: Apps

2015-01-29

So far we’ve read backup files, parsed contacts, and parsed messages. Today we’re going to dig a little deeper and start parsing apps specifically.

iOS Backups in Racket: Messages

2015-01-27

So far we’ve laid the groundwork, loading local iOS backups and parsed out contacts. Today let’s take another step down the rabbit hole and figure out how messages are stored.

iOS Backups in Racket: Contacts

2015-01-23

After yesterday’s post laying the groundwork for looking into iOS Backups, today why don’t we actually start digging into one of the more interesting files: your list of contacts.

iOS Backups in Racket: Groundwork

2015-01-22

For the last little while, I’ve been spending my spare programming time working on a slightly larger project than I normally do: a Racket library for reading iOS backups.

Basically, I want to take the mess that is an iOS backup (not particularly designed to be easy to read by other programs) and extract some information from it, backing it up in a more easily readable format.

Specifically, I would like to be able to backup:

Contact information: Even thought they’re mostly from Facebook, it will be useful for the other parts
Messages: These are taking up a large portion of my phone’s hard drive, mostly due to attachments. Back them up just in case¹²
Photos: I’m already backing these up, but it would be nice to have it in the same process
Application data:
List of applications over time
Moves: GPS location
Downcast: List of current podcasts
Sleep Cycle: Sleep data
Boardgame Scorer: High scores for board games

Let it snow!

2015-01-09

♫ Oh the weather outside is frightful¹… ♫

Generating omnichromatic images

2015-01-01

Inspired half by a post on the Code Golf StackExchange and half by the corresponding website allrgb.com, today’s post tasks us with making images like this:

So what’s so interesting about that picture?

Palette Swapping

2014-12-23

Today’s task comes from the Code Golf StackExchange. The idea behind code golf is to write a program with as few characters as possible, often rendering the code nigh on unreadable. Luckily, the same StackExchange also host popularity contests, one of which is the inspiration behind today’s post:

You are given two true color images, the Source and the Palette. They do not necessarily have the same dimensions but it is guaranteed that their areas are the same, i.e. they have the same number of pixels. Your task is to create an algorithm that makes the most accurate looking copy of the Source by only using the pixels in the Palette. Each pixel in the Palette must be used exactly once in a unique position in this copy. The copy must have the same dimensions as the Source. – American Gothic in the palette of Mona Lisa: Rearrange the pixels

A "one" line echo server using let in Racket

2014-11-13

A recent post on Reddit caught my attention: A “One” Line Echo Server Using “let” in Python (original article). The basic idea is that you can use Python’s lambda with default arguments as a let, which in turn allows you to write a simple echo server in ~~one line~~ a nicely functional style.

Clockception

2014-11-04

Let’s talk about clocks.

We can draw traditional analog clocks¹:

We can draw nice digital clocks:

┌─┐  │ │ ─┐ ┌─┐
│ │└─┤    │ │ │
└─┘  │ │ ─┴─└─┘

Or we can go downright mad and make clocks out of clocks:

Even animated!